Let My People Think

Posts tagged ‘holy spirit’

Learning to operate the kingdom of God calls for a fundamentally different epistemology (a theory of acquiring reliable knowledge). In this physical world, we learn to rely on our bodies, which translate the stimuli of the surroundings through the 5 senses into electromagnetic impulses, which are in turn deciphered and interpreted by the brain as representing reality.

I should note here that we don’t ever directly perceive anything in this physical world, although it might appear that way. For instance, when I “see” a car, light is reflected off of the car’s body and onto the cornea, through the pupil onto the lens, and eventually onto the retina of my eye. So when my eye “sees” the car, it sees it upside down. At this point, “I” still haven’t seen the car. The image needs to travel further than my eyeball. It needs to get compressed into a message that is then sent through the optic nerve up to the brain, where it’s deciphered, and then “I” am finally able to “see” the car, right side up.

To better understand the nature of what we commonly refer to as “salvation” (when we mean “new birth”, or “being born again”), I suggest we look at the entirety of what it entails.

Normally when we use the word salvation loosely in that sense, we refer to it as a “thing” rather than a transformative series of events changed 1) the essence of who we are, and 2) the covenant basis of how God relates to us.

To give you an example – we commonly use expressions like “losing salvation” to refer to the concept of a born-again believer the returning to his or her previous, unsaved, state of being. If we view a salvation as a thing, then we are justified to refer to that concept as “losing salvation”. An implication of this, then, is that salvation is a “thing” that we “found” (since we can “lose” it). Sort of like finding a penny – we find it, pick it up, put it in the pocket, the pocket has a hole, so we lose it.